By ninth, he was enrolled in advanced-placement calculus at Fairview High, but he found the content a little too focused on memorizing formulas and not focused enough on the way the math actually works.

And last semester -- having exhausted the available math curriculum at high school -- the 17-year-old junior took a class at the University of Colorado.

Xu has always been good at math, but he didn't start exploring the vast and complicated world of numbers until he competed in his first middle school math contest.

Now, the Fairview High School student is one of 10 students chosen to compete in the first national "Who Wants to Be a Mathematician" contest in San Francisco. If he wins, both he and the Fairview math department will receive $5,000.

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"Charles is exceptional," said Silva Chang, founder and director of Colorado Math Circle and the person who helped Xu enter his first math contest. "He's one of the strongest math students in the country, and one of the most self-motivated."

The contest is sponsored by the American Mathematical Society and will take place Jan. 14 at the Joint Mathematicians Meeting, which will be attended by about 6,000 mathematicians.

When Xu isn't thinking about math, he can be found training in Taekwondo, reading books, researching politics or, "weather permitting," out on the ski slopes.

He isn't yet sure what he'll study after high school -- he said it will likely be a difficult choice between mathematics and theoretical physics. Either way, he's likely to keep studying math in his spare time.

"It's probably the purest intellectual activity that you can have," he said.

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